For the past few days, I’ve been trying to update and clear out my GMail contact list so that I could sync it to my phone.

Yesterday, I achieve my clean-up goals, and so this morning I backed up my contacts onto my Mac and turned on the contact sync’ing.

Looking on the Google website, it says that to only synchronise the ‘My Contacts’ group, you should chose to delete all of the contacts on your iPhone, otherwise the ‘All Contacts’ group is sync’d. I dutifully deleted all of the contacts because I had spent time sorting out the groups.

Once I turned the sync’ing on, I went to see what Contacts I had, and to my surprise, there were none! I wasn’t worried too much as I could restore them from my Mac, but that wouldn’t be for a few days.

Half an hour later, I went back and checked again and everything had finally synchronised, so there wasn’t a problem. If you get into the same situation, I guess the advice is not to panic, and to leave your phone to do it’s thing for a while!

One thing I didn’t pay attention to was the ‘Favourites’ option – I have a handfull of people in that list and it cones in handy. Fortunately, after the sync, the favourites list is preserved and are mapped to the same named contacts from Google.

However, I have noticed that I have contacts from my ‘All Contacts’ group in the list, so it looks like the advice on Google’s website might be wrong.

Well, I’ve spent a bit of time working with the Google synchronising on my iPhone that I spoke about recently, so I thought I should probably post an update to tell you how I’ve got on.

Well, the Calendar sync’ing is bloody fantastic. I’ve started to get my arse in gear and get my life slightly more organised, and it’s really helping. There is a slight delay in the synchronising, a 10-15 seconds at most, I’d guess, but other than that, it’s perfect. The only downside that I’ve found is that I have recently been playing with some of the lab features of Google Calendar, specifically, the calendar which shows you the birthdays of my Google Contacts and the ToDo List calendars. The Contacts list calendar is transferred to my phone, but the ToDo list isn’t. I’m guessing that that is more to do with Google not sharing it, rather than the iPhone not capable of receiving it.

At the time I set up the synchronisation, I did not enable the contact synchronising, as the contacts on my phone are far more up-to-date. In the inbetween time, I’ve been busy updating my Google contacts, but they still aren’t completely updated, so I still need some time before I can switch that on. However, I did discover that I can already search the contacts and view them on my phone, by using the Contacts App, and pressing the back arrow at the top left of the screen. I can then see the contacts on my phone and my Google contacts.

Finally, and most excitingly, Google have now activated the mail synchronisation, and you can get Push email from Google to your phone. Now, I’m wondering whether this is particularly useful. I retrieve emails from my GMail account using IMAP, I receive updates from that every 15 minutes or so (a preference that I chose, but it could be sooner.) In most cases, that is sufficient for my needs, if I needed it to be faster, I can change the checking interval. The major advantage of Push Email is that you receive it almost immediately. The major disadvantage is that it keeps a constant connection and therefore it drains the battery life of the phone much quicker. So, is it worth it? For me, no, but then I don’t need near instant access to my GMail account – and maybe you should consider that too before you turn it on.

Basically, I wanted to get my calendars on Google Calendar synchronised with my iPhone (because really, my google calendar is my main calendar) and seeing as iPhone OS 3.0 supports the CalDAV standard, it should be a piece of piss.

Anyway. Turns out, you can add the calendar quite easily by following these instructions

Turns out, Google have implemented an Exchange Server which lets you synchronise Calendar items and Contacts with your account.

Reading between the lines, you have to be careful regarding the contacts in your GMail account, as possibly they end up on your iPhone and any contacts on your iPhone end up on GMail. It sounds like you can turn that off, but actually it sounds quite useful too. The added plus of that is, if you change the contacts in GMail, they should synchronise back to Address Book on your Mac once you plug you iPhone back in. So, one address book to rule them all.

The added plus is, you get all of your calendars on you iPhone and you can add and remove items to your hearts content!

I have just discovered that the iPhone doesn’t support WAP sites (I discovered this by trying to use National Rail‘s WAP site).

Now, I’m aware that this might sound a little redundant, but I really think the iPhone should work with WAP pages. Sure, you have a perfectly good web browser on the iPhone that renders ordinary web pages perfectly well. But….

You simply cannot escape from the fact that the screen is small, and it can be a real pain in the arse scrolling around the screen, zooming in and out, etc.

Which are similar problems that WAP pages were designed to solve!

And seeing as there are some sites out there that are much, much, quicker to use through a WAP site rather than their HTML-based equivalents, it kind of makes sense some times….

The slightly observant of you will have noticed that I have changed the theme on this site. I was inspired to do whilst I upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress.

Whilst the old theme was OK, there are a couple of annoying little glitches that bothered me, not to mention that it made no attempt at (visually) indicating that there was an RSS feed available.

Hopefully, the new theme should solve a lot of those problems (although, I’m yet to try it on a slightly smaller screen).

The other benefit of upgrading of course is that the app for my iPhone now works. Well done to the developers that changed the app so that it would only work with the latest version, and didn’t tell anyone. Genius!

Hopefully, the more observant of you will have noticed that this website has changed.

Yup, it’s true, I’ve finally updated this site. As promised previously, it now runs off of a WordPress engine, and has a new theme. I’ve also cleared out the cobwebs and got rid of a load of tat that was unfinished and was lingering around.

The other bonus of this, means that I’m now writing my first blog post on my iPhone.

So, there have been a couple of recent things that have made me come to a decision about this blog.

First, I’ve used up a lot of disk space on my host’s server with my blog database. The prime culprit for that, is comment spam. I manually approved comments and trackbacks, and have a list of spam words that I use to block unwanted comments. However, this has always been a manual process. I’d always intended on using the spam comments and trackbacks to build a bayesian filter, but never got around to it. This morning, I deleted over 160,000 spam comments, and have over 60,000 left to check. That has freed up the disk space but doesn’t solve the problem of me getting lots and lots of spam

Secondly, I’ve wanted to improve this site’s design for a while, so I’d previously started a rewrite to change the look, and to improve the spam filtering.

Thirdly, posting has always been a little difficult for me. I’ve always been able to post via email, which has worked great, but doesn’t let me do advanced features, plus I’ve always hankered for using ATOM or XML-RPC to post with so I can use some standard tools. Except, I never got around to doing that. Now that I have an iPhone, I want to use some of the blogging tools available for that to post to the blog.

These things have lead me to a fine conclusion – Migrate to WordPress. Why WordPress? I don’t know, just another blog system so don’t argue with me, damn it. I can use it’s inbuilt spam protection (and more with the use of plugins); I can update just the theme of the site quite easily without messing too much with the code; and I can also use the WordPress app on my iPhone too.

So, this leaves me with several problems…

I need to import my existing blog into WordPress. There doesn’t appear to be any reference for this, but I think I can start from here: SimplePHPBlog Import Utility. I’m considering creating some PHP library that can be used to insert data into the WordPress table structures. I’ll then make this freely downloadable.

I need to implement my own theme. Fiddling with CSS and PHP in the template has already started. Shouldn’t take too long

Check out existing blog functionality and get it to work within WordPress

Sort out mod_rewrite so that the existing permalinks work without a problem

Integrate my “static” non-blog pages into WordPress

I also have a problem in that I can currently installed WordPress under a separate subdomain, and will need to copy this from one directory to another once it is completed. Hopefully this won’t be a problem!

So, I’m now seriously considering getting an iPhone 3G. My trusty Nokia N80 is now coming up to two years old (end of next month), and it’s started to crash when I try and send text messages sometimes.

Having reviewed a couple of things, I was unsure of what tariff to go on. Keen not to waste money, I guessed that if I went onto a high tariff, I wouldn’t be able to change down – I was correct, you can’t change down for 9 months after activation, and you can’t drop more than one tariff level per month after that. The main question I had though was “Can I upgrade the tariff?”. Lets imagine that I go on the £30 per month tariff, and realise that I’m using it too much and it would be cheaper for me to be on the £35 per month tariff. After what point can I change the tariff?

Well, having asked in my local O2 shop, I got an abrupt “9 months!” answer (in fact, annoyingly she answered before I’d even finished asking the question). Having clarified that I meant “change up” and not “change down”, I was again met with the same abrupt “Still 9 months!” answer (again, before I’d finished asking my question). Helpful, to the point of rudeness.

Now, I wasn’t sure about the answer to this, so I’ve checked online and the first answer I found online was a bit vague. Having search again I’ve now found the answer and the website states: You can change your tariff to a higher tariff at any time.

Thank you. Clarity.

My biggest gripe with all this is the abruptness of the woman in the O2 shop, and here seemingly not willing to admit that she didn’t know. I’ve got much more respect for somebody that can say “I’m sorry, I don’t know/not sure about that. Can you wait a moment, and I can check that for you”, rather than sticking to their guns and insisting on their first answer.

Mobile phone salesman actually really annoy me like this – very few people would be impressed by their somewhat aggressive sales pitches, and a lot would appreciate someone who is prepared to go out of their way to be correct, rather than someone that knows all the answers (or wants people to think they do). For those of you that know me already know that, in fact, I used to be a mobile phone salesman (albeit in a small independent shop, rather than a large chain), and I can actually remember someone coming back into our shop, having found a cheaper deal elsewhere because we were willing to spend time with him. If I were anybody else, I’d tell people to stick to independent shops (although, finding them now-a-days can be difficult), or to get basic facts from large retailers, do the rest of the research yourself, and then go back to the large retailers and do a “walk-in, purchase, get-out” manoeuvre.